“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not that I am holding back so much as that, in your terms, what follows is dependent upon an understanding of concepts presented earlier. People who are still worrying about one soul, gods, and devils, must be helped to relate to greater realities from their own framework, and gently led away from it if possible. Probabilities have been mentioned in such a way that alternate realities are presented, showing such people that choices are available.

All probable worlds exist now. All probable variations on the most minute aspect in any reality exist now. You weave in and out of probabilities constantly, picking and choosing as you go along. The cells within your body do the same thing.

(Slowly:) I told you once that there were pulses of activity in which you blinked off and on — this applying even to atomic and subatomic particles.¹ “You” assign as real — present here and now — only that activity that is your signal. “You” are not aware of the others. When people think in terms of one self, they of course identify with one body. You know that the cellular structure of it changes constantly. The body is at any given moment, however, a mass conglomeration of energy formed from that rich bank of probable activity. The body is not stable in the terms usually thought of. On deeper biological levels the cells straddle probabilities, and trigger responses. Consciousness rides upon and within the pulses mentioned earlier, and forms its own organizations of identity. Each probability — probable only in relation to and from the standpoint of another probability — is inviolate, however, in that it is not destroyed. Once formed, the pattern will follow its own nature.

(A one-minute pause at 9:50, head bowed, eyes closed.) The organizations of consciousness “grow” even as cells grow into organs. Groups of probable selves, then, can and do form their own identity structure, which is quite aware of the probable selves involved. In your reality, experience is dependent upon time, but all experience is not so structured. There are, for example, parallel events that are followed as easily as you follow consecutive events.

The structure of probabilities deals with parallel experience on all levels. Your consciousness picks and chooses to accept as real the results of, and ramifications of, only certain overall purposes, desires, or intents. You follow these through a time structure. Your focus allows other just-as-legitimate experience to become invisible or unfelt.

In the same way that you latch upon one personal biological history, you latch upon but one mass earth history. Others go on about you all the time, and other probable selves of your own experience their “histories” parallel to yours. In practical terms of sense data, those worlds do not meet. In deeper terms they coincide. Any of the infinite number of events that could have happened to you and Ruburt [do] happen. Your attention span simply does not include such activity.

(10:00.) Such endless creativity can seem so dazzling that the individual would appear lost within it,² yet consciousness forms its own organizations and psychic interactions at all levels. Any consciousness automatically tries to express itself in all probable directions, and does so. In so doing it will experience All That Is through its own being, though interpreted, of course, through that familiar reality of its own. You grow probable selves as a flower grows petals. Each probable self, however, will follow through in its own reality — that is, it will experience to the fullest those dimensions inherent to it. You pick and choose one birth and one death, in your terms.

(10:22.) You are examining probable atoms. You are composed of probable atoms. (A one-minute pause.) Give us a moment … (A one-minute pause.) Consciousness, to be fully free, had to be endowed with unpredictability. All That Is had to surprise himself, itself, herself, constantly, through freely granting itself its own freedom, or forever repeat itself. This basic unpredictability then follows through on all levels of consciousness and being. A certain cellular structure may seem inevitable within its own frame of reference only because opposing or contradictory probabilities do not appear therein.

In your terms, consciousness is able to hold its own sense of identity by accepting one probability, one physical life, for example, and maintaining its identity through a lifetime. Even then, certain events will be remembered and others forgotten. The consciousness also learns to handle alternate moments as it “matures.” As it does so mature it forms a new, larger framework of identity, as the cell forms into an organ on another level.

In your terms — the phrase is necessary — the moment point,⁵ the present, is the point of interaction between all existences and reality. All probabilities flow through it, though one of your moment points may be experienced as centuries, or as a breath, in other probable realities of which you are a part.

The cells are also aware of probabilities in a more familiar fashion than you are, as they manipulate the past and future history of the body. Ruburt now, again, is experiencing massiveness, as in your idea of probabilities the cellular structure feels its vast endurance. Working with events not even real to you, it produces a physical structure that maintains identity and predictability out of a vastly creative network. That network is unpredictable, yet from it Ruburt can predictably put ashes into that shell. (Jane held up her favorite ashtray, the abalone shell we’d found in Baja California in 1958, and tapped some ashes into it from her cigarette.) The predictability of that gesture rests upon the basis of an unpredictability, in which multitudinous other actions could have occurred, and in other realities do occur.

In a very small measure you can see how this works when you think of your mother in, say, her last years, and compare your idea of her with those of [your brothers] Linden and Richard. She was a different person to each of you. She was herself; but in the interweavings of probabilities, while certain agreed-upon historic events were accepted, she admitted into her reality whatever portions of your probable reality she chose. Each of you had a different mother.

Probabilities intersect then in your experience, and their intersection you call reality. Biologically and psychically these are intersections, coming-togethers, consciousness adopting a focus.

Now: Atoms can move in more directions than one at once.⁷ You only perceive scientifically the probable motion you are interested in. The same applies to subjective experience.

Anything less than complete unpredictability will ultimately result in stagnation, or orders of existence that in the long run are self-defeating. Only from unpredictability can any system emerge that can be predictable within itself. Only within complete freedom of motion is any “ordered” motion truly possible.

From the “chaotic” bed of your dreams springs your ordered daily organized action. In your reality, the behavior of your consciousness and of your molecules are highly connected. Your type of consciousness presupposes a molecular consciousness, and your kind of consciousness is inherent in molecular consciousness — inherent within your system, but not basically predictable. Predictability is simply another word for significance. Unpredictability, looking at itself in a variety of different fashions, finds certain portions of itself significant, and forms certain orders, or ordered sequences, about itself. In one of our very early sessions, I told you that you perceive from a vast field only certain data that you find meaningful. That data could only arise from the bed of unpredictability. Only unpredictability can provide the greatest source of probable orders.

In dreams you are acquainted with probable events, from which you then choose; (to me:) so before you died as a child, you knew that you could pick or choose that death. In greater terms you chose both life and death, and the picture of you at the age of 16⁹ was never taken in one reality.

His probable brain can translate only so much of this at one time.

(“Yes. Good night.” 12:06 A.M. Jane still felt somewhat massive. A few notes added the next day: She slept restlessly, and found herself “giving material on probabilities just about all night.” She woke up often, and at such times was relieved to discover that she hadn’t been holding a session that I wasn’t recording. As it was, she laughed, the material was still “safe” — we’d get it at a regular session.

1. In several of the sessions he delivered in 1970–71 for Seth Speaks, Seth explained how atoms and molecules phase in and out of our physical system. See especially the 567th session in Chapter 16: “Now the same sort of behavior occurs on a deep, basic, secret and unexplored psychological level.” Some of the probable systems arising out of such activity would be quite alien to us: “One such fluctuation might take several thousand of your years … [which] would be experienced, say, as a second of your time …” Jane elaborates upon related ideas from her own viewpoint in Chapter 10, among others, in her Adventures in Consciousness.

3. According to Seth, then, in one probability I failed to survive the operation I underwent for appendicitis in this reality when I was 11 years old. My second probable death took place sometime during the years of my military service (1943–46) in World War II. It’s interesting to note that Seth says I was a pilot, and hence an officer, in that probability. In the reality I know, I served in the ATC — the Air Transport Command — as an aircraft instrument specialist and mechanic, with the rank of staff sergeant. While on duty in some of the remote islands of the Pacific, however, I managed to get in some flying time, though not as a pilot.

4. I thought that in his last sentence especially Seth was flirting with the principle of uncertainty, or indeterminacy, as postulated in 1927 by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. In quantum mechanics this axiom maintains that it’s not possible to simultaneously ascertain the momentum and position of a subatomic wave-particle like an electron, say — electrons being one of the qualities that make up atoms. The day after this session was held, I asked Jane if she’d heard of Heisenberg. She hadn’t; nor did she understand his work, as best I could explain it to her.

“Now: Often precognitive information will appear to be wrong. In some cases this is because a self has chosen a different probable event for physical materialization [than the one predicted]. I have access to the field of probabilities and you do not, egotistically…. To me, your past, present, and future merge into one.

“On the other hand, as I have told you, you change your past continually. It does not appear to change to you, for you change with it … You alter your future in the same manner. In such cases it is necessary that the correct channel of probable events be perceived — correct meaning the channel which shall be ultimately chosen [for actualization by the subject] .

“These choices, however, are based upon your changing perception of past and present. Because I have a larger scope of perception than you, I can with greater facility predict what may happen. But this is dependent upon my prediction as to which choice [of probable events] you will make, and the choice is still your own … Predictions, per se, do not contradict the theory of free will, though free will is dependent upon much more than any freedom of the ego alone. If the ego were allowed to make all the choices, with no veto power from other layers of the self, you would all be in a sad position indeed.

“I can, therefore, perceive far more than you can of your own future. I am hardly omnipotent, however. Nor, strictly speaking, is such omnipotence possible.”

7. As an artist, my intuitive reaction to Seth’s remark that an atom can move in more than one direction at once was to associate that ability with his notions of simultaneous time and probabilities. The artist, since he isn’t any kind of a scientist (even though he might be interested in science in general), attempts to grapple with the statement as best he can, in light of the feeling he has for what Seth is trying to say. At the same time he realizes that from his artistic viewpoint he may not be able to understand the paradox of “contradictory” motions.

To simplify a great deal: In modern physics it’s said that atoms are processes, not things; that atoms and/or their constituents can appear as either waves or particles, depending on how we observe them; and that these qualities exist outside of our coarse world of space and time. Atoms are patterns of probabilities. It’s further said that our attempts to describe or visualize such nonphysical qualities inevitably cause us to misinterpret them; so the artist wonders whether the atom’s movement in more than one direction at once may not be perfectly “natural” in its own environment — some sort of ability quite separate from any play we may indulge in with words while trying to consciously comprehend it.